Meg Mason
Sophie, Standing There
“So smart, so funny, so moving – Mason has done it again, this time using behind the scenes of a literary festival to reveal the complexity of loneliness and how one woman attempts to dig herself out. I absolutely loved it”
HarperCollins, 2026
From the award-winning, bestselling author of Sorrow and Bliss comes an achingly tender, poignant, funny and bittersweet story of love, loneliness and finding connection in the most unlikely of places.
Sophie Pattison is such a lovely person. Warm, kind, amazingly positive. She works as a freelance sound technician for literary festivals. She is a massive reader and was recently forced to move house. She is bracingly lonely.* So much so, the absence of others feels like a physical weight, if that makes sense. But then Sophie discovers an author through work, and comes to adore her. Her books, interviews and podcasts, her wisdom and brilliance, her beautiful words. It's like solace and company. It's almost like love. And Sophie would love to meet her, although she never will, obviously. The author would never come to her festival. She's too famous for that. Too brilliant, too beautiful. And in a way, thank goodness, because that would change everything. Sophie's entire life.
But ... what if she did?
* although she has a best friend called Emma, and an amazing brother. And a husband. But a number of things happened there.
About the Author
Meg Mason is the author of You Be Mother and Sorrow and Bliss, which became an international bestseller after it was published in 2021. Winner of the 2022 Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, and shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction, it has since been translated into thirty languages. Meg's first career was in journalism, beginning at The Times of London and later writing for Vogue, Elle, GQ, Sunday Style and the New Yorker's 'Daily Shouts and Murmurs' column. Born in New Zealand, she lives in Sydney with her husband and two daughters.